Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I intend on withdrawing this amendment. I wish to make a few points before I do so.

In the supplemental bill, the Job Corps receives a direction that the Department of Labor can’t manage it, can’t use the resources to manage it. There are documented errors and documented fraud within it.

Mr. President, section 7017 of the Emergency Supplemental would mandate that Job Corps operate with less accountability. Specifically, the language would make Job Corps the only program out of 100s to be operated out of the Secretary’s office with direct contracting authority.

The Office of the Secretary of Labor does not have the staff or resources to effectively manage and conduct oversight on the Job Corps. The language of Section 7017 forbids the Secretary from shifting oversight and management personnel from any other support office in the Department of Labor. Secretary Chao is forbidden to utilize the same oversight and management that every other program normally receives from other support offices within the Department.

Section 7017 ignores recommendations from the Government Accountability Office and the Inspector General that warn against the dangers of waste, fraud, and abuse that will go undetected in the Job Corps program when one office controls all aspects of a contract-drafting, soliciting, bidding, and managing.The incestuous relationship between the contractors who operate the Job Corp program and the program officers operating the program will have no independent oversight to guard against improper payments, improper use of resources, fraudulent performance reporting resulting in fraudulent salary bonuses, and non-compliant accounting and record keeping.

Secretary Chao is trying to clean up the Job Corps program so that it effectively serves low income teenagers and young adults with a residential job training program. The Job Corps program needs accountability. According to the Office of Job Corps, the program failed to have aggressive monitoring of performance data making evaluations of the program’s effectiveness unreliable.

The Job Corps contractors are reporting misinformation regarding the number of students that successfully graduate or receive G

EDs. The contractors fail to report that almost 40 percent of the students who go through the program fail to obtain a GED or diploma. This results in fraudulent bonus increases to the contractor’s pay.

The program fails to report that the median stay of a student at a Job Corps location is 8 months, while it takes at least 12 months to successfully obtain a GED. The program also fails to accurately report how many students successful receive

job placement into the skilled jobs for which the Job Corps is supposed to equip the students. They fail to report that only 5 percent of the graduating students are placed in apprenticeships for skilled jobs. The contractors incorrectly consider job placement in unskilled jobs and the military–(obtainable without a high school education)–as benchmarks for success. This results in fraudulent bonus increases to their pay.

Examples of mismanagement illustrated in past Inspector General Reports include doctoring of program performance resulting in bonus pay, unethical use of resources, lack of cost controls and resource management. These examples makes the point for Secretary Chao–that the Job Corps program is in desperate need for accountability and oversight.

The September 30, 2005 Inspector General report, San Diego Job CORPS Center: Student Attendance and Training Data Overstated, stated that the number of vocational completions was overstated by over 50 percent. Training records did not support that students had completed all the vocation’s tasks with an appropriate level of proficiency.

In the March 30, 2005 Inspector General report, Kittrell Job Corps Center: Manipulation of Student Attendance and Training Records, the Inspector General found that Kittrell managers manipulated student attendance and training records to improve the center’s reported performance. Reported performance of high school diploma attainment and job placements was also was not reliable. This unreliable data affected Job Corps financially because reimbursed operating expenses and incentive fees paid to contracted center operators and based on reported performance.In the 2001 independent auditor’s report on the schedule of Job Corps expenses for the Turner Job Corps Center, the Inspector General found inadequate controls over payroll processing, that included hiring two instructors without proper credentials and keeping inaccurate records of leave. There was also lack of accountability over inventories of consumable supplies, evidence that the center underreported medical and dental expense, and the purchase of property and equipment that Department of

Labor did not approve prior to acquisition.

In the January 31, 2000 report entitled OIG Questions $1.3 Million of Additional Costs Claimed by Contractor Report No. 18-00-003-03-370, the Inspector General found that the contractor Will H. Hall & Son, Inc. received an additional $2,365,622 due to delays at their construction site. The Inspector General found that this contractor failed to substantiate its claim that various events under the Department of Labor’s contract constituted compensable construction delays caused by the Department

of Labor. Certain amounts claimed were either double counted as both direct and indirect costs, already covered under the original firm fixed-price contract, or based on estimates instead of actual costs incurred.

Section 7017 of the Emergency Supplemental will virtually guarantee that we will see many more examples of [Page: S3939]

waste, fraud and abuse within the Job Corps program. Furthermore, why is the Senate being asked to make a program change to a 40-year-old program within an Emergency Supplemental bill? Why hasn’t the Department of Labor been consulted in making this unprecedented move away from accountability? Why hasn’t the Appropriations Committee or the Committee

on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions held a single hearing about this radical change to the Job Corps program?

Due to time constraints and my desire to move Senate business forward, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment.

The older OIG reports published here further expose and prove the seriousness of the Job Corps and its contractor’s manipulation of numbers and false statistics–nothing has changed. We are building new Job Centers and increasing the yearly amounts of money for this program based on falsified reports.

What OIG Found

“The Department did not fully comply with WIA and GPRA reporting requirements. As a result, Congress, OMB and other decision makers may have lacked some critical data for making informed decisions regarding the Job Corps program.”

“We also found that Job Corps did not fully comply with OMB’s reporting requirements for job placement outcomes. Job Corps did not include all students who left the program in its reported job placement data, but instead only reported placement outcomes for students who had been enrolled for at least 60 days.”

“Nothing has changed since 1998 other than more waste and fraud. There are more Job Corps centers at this point, 122 with one more scheduled to open this yr and another one on hold in Manchester NH. That brings the number up to 123 from 118 when this report was written and two more are in the planning stage. Soon there may be 126 – with no plans to end building more.

The cost per student, cited in this Congressional Report is $26,000 as per the GAO. The cost today is somewhere around $28,000; this doesn’t seem accurate – only $2,000 more in 12 yrs? The budget for Job Corps is up to $1.7 billion pr yr from around $1.28 billion in 1998. Read the rest of this entry »

RSS Feed Subscription

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 105 other followers

What’s On this Website?

Make sure to click on the individual categories listed on this page...
*Office of the Inspector General (OIG) Audit Reports showing number manipulation, fraudulent statistics and false inflation of numbers of graduated students...
*Legislative and Congressional Reports detailing testimonies from Senators and Congressmen that Job Corps is inneffective...
*Newspaper articles and books about Job Corps